At the beginning of “The Spirit of the Beehive” (1973), Víctor Erice’s sublime first feature, a travelling projectionist arrives at a remote Castilian village, bearing a print of James Whale’s “Frankenstein.” It’s 1940, not long after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and the townsfolk, eager for entertainment, are soon transfixed by this sad, haunting tale of a man-made monster—none more so than Ana (Ana Torrent), a six-year-old girl with a solemn gaze and a steadfast belief that she is witnessing something terrifyingly real. And who, having experienced Whale’s classic themselves, could argue with her? Ana’s older sister, Isabel (Isabel Tellería), does try to allay her fears: “Everything in the movies is fake.” And yet, Isabel insists, with a twinkle of mischief, there is an actual monster in the village, a mysterious spirit with whom they can communicate at will. “Close your eyes,” she whispers, “and call him.” Five decades later, “The Spirit of the Beehive” still ranks among the most auspicious of débuts and the greatest of Spanish films; released during the last years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, it established Erice as a leading voice in a national art cinema that was just beginning to reëmerge. It also made clear, right from the start, that cinema itself would be Erice’s grand obsession. Everything in the movies may be fake, as little Isabel says, but there is nothing phony about their power over us—a lesson that Ana learns at an early age. So does Estrella, the thoughtful young heroine of Erice’s second feature, “El Sur” (1983), whose life is forever changed after she spies her father walking alone into a cinema, chasing the spectre of his lost love. Erice’s own love of the movies has never been in doubt, even when the movies haven’t loved him back. “El Sur,” adapted from a novella by Adelaida García Morales, was both an exquisite work and an incomplete one; its final third was never filmed, reportedly for financial reasons, though Erice has disputed this. Since then, he has made a superb documentary, “The Quince Tree Sun” (1992); a 2007 nonfiction collaboration […]
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